Brother and Sister (15 page)

"Where's Daniel?" Ellen said. She was standing in the doorway in jeans and a pink sweatshirt top, which Petey much admired,
with a hood and "Sugababes" printed on the front, in sequins.

Petey crossed his eyes and put the neck of the shampoo bottle in his mouth.

"Don't drink the
bathwater,
" Ellen said, swooping.

Petey beamed up at her. He put a coy hand up, to finger the hairclips.

"You look ridiculous," Ellen said. She turned and yelled over her shoulder, "
Daniel!
"

David said, from further down the landing, "He's in the kitchen."

"He's supposed to be watching Petey."

"Isn't it simpler to do it yourself?"

Ellen sighed.

"That isn't the
point—
"

David came into the bathroom. He stooped to kiss Petey's head.

"You look a right little fairy."

Petey lowered his eyelashes.

"The floor's
soaking
—"

"I'll mop it," David said.

Ellen began to soap a flannel vigorously.

She said, in a voice strongly reminiscent of her mother's, "There's a cloth under the basin."

"I know."

"Only reminding you—"

"I
know,
" David said.

Ellen picked up Petey's nearest hand. It was covered with green and purple slashes from coloring pens.

"It's always me," Ellen said. "I don't mind, because I can do it, but I do mind the assumption that I
will
do it."

David knelt beside her on the floor, holding the cloth.

"Do you mean looking after Petey?"

"Petey!" Petey shouted, rattling his hairclips.

Ellen picked up his other hand.

"Well, yes. But it's other stuff too."

David began to sweep the cloth across the pools of water on the floor.

He said carefully, "What other stuff—"

"You know," Ellen said, rubbing Petey's hand. "You know what I mean. At least, you'd know if you could think about
anything
except chess,
ever.
"

David got up, and wrung the floorcloth out over the basin.

He said, his back towards Ellen, "You mean Mum."

"Yes."

"In what—way exactly?"

Ellen lifted Petey to his feet in order to soap his body.

She said crossly, "Do I have to spell it out to you?"

"No," David said. "But nor do you have to be rude."

Ellen turned to look at him, one hand still steadying Petey in the bath.

"I'm fed up!" she shouted. "I'm fed up with nobody paying attention to us, with you so obsessed with chess you can't think
about another thing and Mum so out of it because of you that she goes from being so much of a mother we can't breathe to absolutely
no mother at all! I'm sick of having to pick up the pieces!"

Petey dropped the shampoo bottle and began to cry. Ellen gave an exasperated sigh and let go of his hand. He sat down abruptly
in the bath, sobbing.

David came across the bathroom holding a towel—not Petey's—and bent to lift his son out of the bath.

"That isn't his towel."

"It doesn't matter."

"Mum—"

"It doesn't bloody
matter,
" David said. He straightened up, holding Petey clumsily wrapped in the towel.

Ellen said into her chest, "I didn't mean to be rude but I did
mean
it."

"I know."

She looked up at her father.

She said, in a suddenly much less confident voice, "What's the matter with Mum?"

David sat down on the closed lid of the toilet with Petey on his knee. Petey was whimpering now, his fingers in his mouth.

"He needs his sleepy rag," Ellen said.

"He can wait—"

"He can't," Ellen said. "You don't want him screaming. I'll get it."

"Thank you," David said. He began to unclip the plastic bows in Petey's hair. Petey's eyes widened for a second, ready for
piercing protest, but then he remembered whose knee he was sitting on and merely went on whimpering round his fingers.

"There," Ellen said. She held out the sleepy rag. "Dad?"

"Yes."

"What about Mum?"

David wrapped Petey close in his towel and held him hard.

"I meant to tell you. I was going to tell you—"

"What?" Ellen said sharply.

"It isn't chess."

"Oh no?"

"No," David said. "I know I play far too much and you all get fed up with me, but it isn't that."

Ellen leaned against the wall. She reached behind her head and pulled up the hood of her sweatshirt, yanking it forward until
it covered her hair and shadowed her face.

"What then?"

David had his face against the top of Petey's head.

"You know I'm adopted. You've always known I was adopted."

"So?"

"And you are quite sure you know what being adopted means?"

Ellen sighed.

"Course."

"Tell me then."

"It means," Ellen said with elaborate boredom, "that your mother couldn't keep you so she had to give you away and she gave
you away to Mr. and Mrs. King and they got killed in a bus crash in France so you got given to Granny Lynne and Grandpa, who
brought you up and are your parents, end of story."

David closed his eyes.

"Not quite."

Ellen flicked the sequins on her front.

"Well, there was Nathalie, too."

"Yes, but that isn't everything. There's something else. My mother, the mother who gave birth to me, is still alive."

Ellen stopped flicking.

"She's called Carole," David said holding on to Petey, "and she lives in London."

There was a pause.

Then Ellen said, "How do you know?"

David opened his eyes.

"I've talked to her."

"You've
talked
to her?"

"Yes," David said, "on the telephone."

Ellen turned slowly until her back was against the wall, and then she slid down until she was sitting on the floor.

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why did you talk to her?"

"I wanted to," David said.

Ellen put her hooded head against her bent knees so that her voice was muffled.

"But she gave you away."

"I know."

"I wouldn't talk to someone who'd given me away."

"I wanted to know the reasons," David said. He reached down and began to rub Petey's toes, through the towel. "There have
to be reasons for doing something as big as that. Think of"—his tone became jocular—"giving Petey away."

"Not funny," Ellen said.

"No. Not funny."

"Who gave you her number?"

"Someone called Elaine Price. Someone who specializes in helping adopted people find their mothers—their parents—if they want
to."

Ellen turned her head a little.

"Why did you want to?"

"I just wanted to know."

"Know what?"

"Where I'd been born, what had happened, who my father was."

"Why?"

David lifted Petey's rag-holding arm to dry beneath it.

"Wouldn't you?"

"I do know," Ellen said.

"Exactly. And if you didn't, wouldn't you want to?"

Ellen tipped herself slowly sideways until she was curled on the floor on her side.

She said babyishly, "But you've got us."

David sighed.

"El, this was
before
you. Before you were even thought of. When I was smaller than even Petey is now. This is my baby story."

Ellen tugged at her hood.

"What was your father called?"

"I don't know."

"Doesn't your mother know?"

"I've talked to her for two minutes on the telephone. We didn't get as far as that."

"What did she sound like?"

"Nervous," David said.

"Why?"

"I expect she didn't know what I wanted."

Ellen rolled towards him. She put up a hand and took hold of one of Petey's feet. He gazed down at her, sucking.

"What did you want?"

"I told you," David said, "I want to know my story."

Ellen sat up slowly. Her hood was slipping backwards, pulling her hair off her face.

"What'll happen?"

"I don't know."

She said uncertainly, "Will you tell us?"

"Of course. I should have told you this much before, probably. Maybe I should have told you when Nathalie first thought of
it."

Ellen's head came up. She let go of Petey's foot.

"Nathalie—"

"Yes. The search lady has found Nathalie's mother too."

"Oh."

"Do you want to know her name?"

"No," Ellen said. She stood up. She said unsteadily, "I wish it
had
been chess."

He looked down at Petey.

"Sorry."

Ellen took a step away. She looked suddenly very young, very truly like the child of twelve she actually was rather than the
one of fourteen or fifteen she usually chose to present to the world.

"I'm going to find Mum," she said.

Daniel withdrew his right leg from under Ellen's sleeping weight, and arranged it, awkwardly, across his left. He'd been amazed
when she'd come into his bedroom, when all the house lights were off, and he was listening to Test Match Special from Adelaide,
on long wave, under the bedclothes, and then even more amazed when she'd wanted to get right into bed with him and he could
see, by the light of the torch he kept by his bed, that she'd been crying.

It had admittedly been a pretty dire evening, with all this stuff about Dad's real mother, stuff that made Daniel want to
go out of the room until it was all over and they could talk about normal things again. It wasn't so much the fact of Dad
having a mother that upset him—even Daniel could see that everything, including hamsters, had to have had a mother to give
birth to them at some point—but rather the look on Dad's face when he talked about it, over supper. And the look on Mum's
face, which didn't match Dad's, and Ellen saying nothing and jabbing her fork into her baked potato until it was a flat, floury
mess which you wouldn't want to eat unless you were so starving you'd eat anything. It was just that there was something wrong—badly
wrong—about Dad's being all turned on by something they couldn't share in, something that was just his, and important to him.
Daniel wasn't in the least keen on his mother's lectures on the importance of loyalty and communal concern in family life,
but she had got it through to him that families do things together, that a family is a club you can always go home to. Dad,
at supper, had looked, quite frankly, like a pretty happy little club of one.

They'd all gone to bed early. Daniel didn't think anyone was particularly tired—he certainly wasn't—but there didn't seem
to be anything else much to do or say. And he'd only been in bed an hour or so, waiting for it to be Jonathan Agnew's turn
to commentate on the cricket from Australia, when the door had opened and Ellen had come in and, without a word, climbed over
him to the wall side of his bed and slithered down beside him under his duvet.

"Ow," he'd said, and, "Your feet are freezing."

"I've been in Petey's room," Ellen said, "sitting on the floor."

"Why didn't you take your duvet?"

"Didn't want to."

"Didn't
think.
"

"Didn't
want
to."

Ellen humped herself sideways until she was facing Daniel. He shone his torch in her face.

"You've been crying."

Ellen shut her eyes. She took a breath and then she said fiercely, "I don't
want
her."

"
Who?
"

"This Dad-mother-granny person."

Daniel shone the torch on the ceiling, on the rusty stain where he'd once successfully flicked a melted piece of chocolate,
on a hot day, with a plastic ruler.

"We don't have to."

"What?"

"She's nothing to do with us," Daniel said. "She's nothing to do with us at
all.
"

"But she
is
" Ellen said, "because of Dad. It'll
make
her be something."

Daniel said stoutly, "I shan't."

"You'll have to."

"I shan't. I'll go to Canada."

"Oh," Ellen said sarcastically, "wave a little Harry Potter wand and zoom off to Canada."

"You could come too. And Petey."

"And Mum."

"Course."

"But," Ellen said, "I don't want to be without Dad. And I don't want Dad to be like
this.
"

Daniel turned the torch off. It occurred to him to ask Ellen why their father should want to do this, to do something that
they didn't want to join in, couldn't join in, and then it struck him that Ellen couldn't answer him any more than he could
answer himself, and that the reason she was in his bed, and taking up too much space, was precisely
because
she didn't know the answer. And, like him, didn't like the question.

After a while, Ellen began to snuffle. At first Daniel thought she was crying again, but then he realized that she was actually
snoring faintly, that she had fallen asleep with her mouth open, taking up most of his pillow and with his right leg imprisoned
under hers. He sighed. He supposed he couldn't even turn the radio on again now, because Ellen, sad but asleep, was more manageable
than Ellen sad and awake, and anyway, if he was honest, there was a peculiar comfort in having her there, snoring or not,
and in a frame of mind in which contempt for him and his pitiful gender was not uppermost.

He gave his leg an experimental twitch. Ellen grunted and muttered something, moving just enough for Daniel to ease himself
free. He assessed the position. He was more comfortable, but not quite comfortable enough. He gave Ellen a nudge with his
right shoulder.

"Shove over," he said.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

W
hen the photograph came Cora rearranged the shrine in the corner of her bedroom. She didn't move the little Buddha from his
central position—there was something about gods that required the limelight—but she moved him back a little, back among the
candles, and the black lacquer vase of incense sticks, and the silk orchid rooted in its water like block of resin, in order
to be able to put the photograph in front, where she could see it. At first, she just propped it against the Buddha, but that
seemed disrespectful to both of them, so she put the photograph in a frame she had made herself, years ago, from scraps of
Oriental brocade glued round cardboard and stood it independently in front of the flames and the flowers and the Buddha's
removed and timeless smile.

Samantha—Nathalie—had sent her the photograph. It showed a dark-haired woman and a curly-haired child in an armchair together,
looking at a book. It wasn't a very big picture but it had enough detail in it for Cora to devour with her eyes: Nathalie's
earrings and Polly's red cardigan with buttons shaped like ladybirds and the outlines of their cheeks and noses.

"She's the image of you," Betty had said, "the image."

"Yes," Cora said, delighted and disbelieving. "Yes."

Betty put the picture down.

"But that's enough."

"What d'you mean, that's enough?"

"That picture's enough," Betty said. She turned away and began to rummage in the vegetable rack. "You've seen this photo of
her, you know she's got a little girl, you know she's well. Just let that be enough."

Cora looked at the picture, at the stylish modern armchair, at Nathalie's hand holding the book open for Polly to see.

"What d'you mean?" she said again.

Betty dumped a double handful of carrots on the draining board.

She said, her back to Cora, "You'll only get hurt."

"Hurt?"

"Yes," Betty said, clattering in the drawer for the peeler.

"If you go any further with this, you'll only get hurt again."

"Why will I?"

"Because," Betty said, spinning round, "that's what will
happen.
She may be a lovely girl but you've gone your different ways, you've lived your different lives and nothing but hurt'll come
out of trying to go back
anywhere.
"

"But I'm not—"

"Of course you are," Betty said. "What else are you trying to do but make what went wrong go all right instead? I don't blame
you, Cora, but you can't. She's not baby Samantha. You're not schoolgirl Cora. I wish she'd never rung you."

Cora said quietly, "I liked it."

Betty pulled a chair out from the table and sat down opposite her sister.

"She's not angry with me," Cora said, gazing at the picture. "She said so."

"Why should she be angry, for Christ's sake?"

"I was careless," Cora said, "wasn't I? I was careless enough to let myself get pregnant, and it was her life I was being
careless about."

Betty gave an exasperated sigh.

"You were drugged. You were raped—"

"I wasn't raped," Cora said. "Don't ever say that. Don't ever say that baby was forced on me. Don't ever say I didn't want
that baby."

Betty leaned across the table.

"I'm just not having you hurt again. You're a single woman, Cora, and we all know that whatever might be good for a married
woman isn't so good for a single one."

Cora put the photograph down flat on the table and covered it with one of her painful hands.

"All my life," she said, without particular resentment, "I've been on the receiving end of other people's views."

"Yes. Well?"

"You all describe me. You always have. It's as if I've got a whole lot of labels stuck on me, as if I've got to be explained
away."

"Not
away,
dear—"

"You've been good to me," Cora said. "You've been better to me than anyone, but even you haven't let me express my feelings."

Betty sat up straight.

"I'm protecting you—"

"Yes, but sometimes it's support I need, not protection. It was support I needed in that Salvation Army home for unmarried
mothers, it was support I needed when they took Samantha away, when they told me that I wasn't fit to keep her, I wasn't fit
to be a mother. I tell you," Cora said, leaning forward over her photograph, "what they meant was that it was wicked to be
fertile. It was wicked to be poor and working-class and fertile."

Betty sniffed. She bent her head towards her folded hands on the tabletop.

"So, right or wrong," Cora said, "this photo isn't enough for me. If Sam—Nathalie wants to meet me, I'm meeting her. It may
throw me back where I started, but I'm taking the chance. All these years, I've been in agony that she'd hate me.

It's all I've worried about, all that's really haunted me. Would she be angry, would she hate me. Well, she didn't sound angry.
Not at all. In fact, she sounded quite surprised I'd asked her. So if I want to meet her to make sure she isn't angry, if
I need to do this to put myself out of all the misery I've been through all these years, then I'm going to do it, risk or
no risk. I can't be in more pain than I've been already, Betty, I can't. But if I'm going to do this, and I am, if she'll
let me, then I'd rather do it with your
support
than without it. Not protection, Betty, not that. Support."

There was a pause. Betty raised her head and looked at Cora. Her eyes were red.

"I'll support you," she said, "but don't say I didn't warn you either."

From the street outside her flat, David could see that Nathalie was in the kitchen. He stood there on the pavement and watched
her for a while, watched her as, propped against the table and quite unaware of being watched, she read something in the local
newspaper, her arms spread wide to hold out the pages. She had her hair pulled back behind her head with some kind of red
scarf or band and there was music playing. He couldn't hear the melody, but he could hear the beat.

He looked at the gap the basement created between the pavement and Nathalie's kitchen window. It was just too wide to lean
across, just too far to touch the glass and alert her. He considered. He could do the conventional thing, of course, and ring
the doorbell, but that didn't seem to him quite to chime with the mood of the moment, the mood that had impelled him to make
a detour through this part of Westerham and surprise Nathalie at eleven o'clock in the morning. He took a deep breath and
sprang in the air. Nathalie went on reading her paper. David took another breath and sprang again and again, shouting. Nathalie
looked up from her paper and saw him.

"You're crackers," she said through the window glass. He nodded, beaming.

"Let me in—"

She vanished from the window and reappeared at the street door, still holding the newspaper.

"What are you doing?"

"What are
you
doing," David said, "reading the paper during working hours?"

She reached up, the newsprint crackling, and put her arms round his neck. He held her.

"I can't settle to much."

"Me neither."

"How's Marnie?"

David released his hold a little.

"Um. Calmer. Very reasonable.
Very
reasonable. Buying tickets for Canada for the summer. And Steve?"

"Fine," Nathalie said. She stepped out of his embrace. "Lovely, actually. Kind."

"Right," David said, "so, good or bad?"

Nathalie led the way into the kitchen.

"Just—just, well—
better.
Nicer."

"Mamie's always nice. It's just that she can easily make me feel I'm not being nice at all."

Nathalie opened the fridge.

"Define nice."

"Good family man."

"Is it too early for a drink?"

"Yes."

Nathalie put a bottle of wine on the kitchen table.

"Perhaps we aren't very good at family."

"What?" David said. "You and me?"

Nathalie took two wine glasses off a shelf.

"Yes. Perhaps we have problems with intimacy."

"Oh, give me a break."

"It's a phrase of Sasha's."

"Who's Sasha?"

"Titus's girlfriend. She's doing a thesis or something. She's got a phrase for everything. Psycho stuff."

"Sounds a bit wacky—"

Nathalie poured wine into the glasses and pushed one towards David. He picked it up.

"I'm driving—"

Nathalie said, "D'you know what I've been thinking? About this intimacy stuff?"

"Tell me."

She folded her arms.

"Perhaps we
are
a bit removed. Perhaps we
do
make it difficult for people to get close to us. Perhaps that has always been our sort of defense mechanism."

David took a tiny sip of wine.

"And?"

Nathalie looked down.

"You know this feeling—"

"What feeling?"

"Well, this feeling we've always had, however kind people are, however much they love us, however much they say we're just
the same as everyone else—" She stopped.

David waited. He waited for several moments and then he put a hand out and touched her shoulder.

She said slowly, "There's always this unspoken thing, isn't there, if you don't know who your parents are, if you don't know
where you come from. There's always this little kind of whisper, this echo, as if society is saying, 'Let's just disappear
you.' "

"Rubbish."

She looked up at him.

"Not
literally.
Not, let's let you starve. But more, let's forget who you really are, let's rub out your real name, and start again, on
our
pattern."

"Real name," David said.

She nodded.

He said, "You know yours."

She nodded again. "And you know yours."

"But not," David said, "my father's name. Not that name."

Nathalie picked up a glass of wine and looked at it and put it down again.

"So, if we discover these things, if we discover these names and things, these histories, then maybe we'll be able to join
in. Properly."

"Is that what you've been thinking?"

"Yes."

"I wish," David said, "that I could think like that."

"You've got me to do it for you."

He put his hands in his pockets.

"I wish you could come and see Carole with me."

Her eyes widened.

"You're seeing her!"

"Yes. That's what I came to tell you."

"Oh my God."

"I know."

"Did she ask you?"

"No. I asked her. I had to ask her several times."

"Didn't she want to?"

David shook the change in his pockets.

"She sounds frightened."

"Aren't you?"

"Oh yes," David said. He took his hands out of his pockets and put his arms round Nathalie. He said, his face against her
hair, "I don't think I've ever been so nervous about anything."

Carole had imagined meeting David in a bar, a bar somewhere perhaps like the Portobello Road. She had visualized somewhere
trendy, somewhere where David's age would pass unnoticed in a crowd of similar ages, a place where she would be the oddity
and therefore unlikely to be spotted by anyone she knew. She had been, covertly, on a small mission or two to find such a
place, and thought she had found one, near the old cinema, with a smart restaurant upstairs and downstairs something much
more relaxed and casual, a kind of brasserie cum bar, with sharp young waiting staff dressed entirely in black. It seemed
to Carole that in such a place David would pass without comment, and she would be invisible. When he next telephoned—and he
was telephoning with a quiet regularity that threw her into a turmoil every time it happened—she was going to say to him that
this was the place where they should meet, and that she would be wearing a brown suede jacket and carrying a copy of the
Financial Times.

But then Connor intervened. His superb and stately response to her revelation had continued almost without a hitch, as if,
she sometimes thought spitefully, looking at his well-shaven face, his well-ironed shirt front, he had at last found a role
in which he could see himself as he had always wanted to, calm and majesterial, possessed of the kindest, most reasonable
of powers.

"Where do you propose to see the boy?" Connor said, his eyes on the crossword on his knee.

"He's called David," Carole said.

Connor raised his glance and looked steadily, significantly at her.

"I think you heard me."

"I haven't decided," Carole said. She ran a hand through her hair. If she told him the truth, he would try and change her
mind. "I haven't really thought."

Connor took his reading glasses off and laid them on the folded paper.

"May I make a suggestion?"

Carole waited. Two weeks ago, a week even, she might have said appeasingly, "I'd be so glad if you did." Now, newly stubborn
in the face of her conflicting hopes and apprehensions, she waited.

"Carole," Connor said, "darling, I think you should see him here."

She stared at him.

"Here!"

"Yes," he said. "Why not?"

"But we live here!"

"And so that's where he should see you."

She pushed herself back into the cushions of her chair.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because—because it's got to be somewhere impersonal, somewhere neither of us belongs—"

"Why?"

"Because," Carole said, almost shouting, "I don't know how it will be!"

Connor cleared his throat. He put the newspaper and his spectacles down on the low table beside him.

Then he said, in a much less portentous voice, "He's your son, Carole, and nothing's going to change that. He ought to see
you in your home, the place that reflects your life, and who you are. He'll be pretty at sea as it is, coming to meet you.
Why make it worse by inflicting a hotel lounge on him?"

Carole said stupidly, "I wasn't thinking of a hotel."

"You should see him here," Connor said. "You should invite him here and give him a whiskey." He paused, and then he said,
"Don't you want to help put him at his ease?"